By Steve Berman
Liberals believe in social engineering. They believe in starting with an outcome, and engineering a plan to make that outcome become true. They believe you can always get what you want. Especially in education, opportunity, and economic status, liberals believe that we can guarantee that diversity of skin color, racial heritage, ancestry, and parentage can be plotted in a standard deviation curve, and with the right tinkering, these results can be made to happen.
They’ve been tinkering for 50 years. We’ve yet to see ourselves get any closer to the planned outcomes, although we do have schools seeking a return to segregation and persecution based on race.
The problem here is that kids who grow up on race identity become adults who live their lives according to race identity. The college kid who got in because he checked the right boxes becomes the admissions officer responsible for ensuring the results fit the curve.
Though they try, they fail–in schools, and in business.
Google’s diversity fail
James Damore has a Harvard Ph.D. in biology. He wrote about physical, biological differences between men and women, by way of explaining why men fill more technical positions at Google. He was fired under the guise of advancing “damaging stereotypes.” They paid Damore to know more about these things than Google executives know, and then fired him when he used that knowledge against them.
Google spent $265 million on diversity, and for their efforts, they have zero Latino executives, a 0 percent gain in the number of female employees from 2013 to 2016 (29 percent), and a 5 percent gain in women in leadership positions (from 8 to 13 percent). That’s dismal if you’re programming to a bell curve. Damore wrote about the bankruptcy of that approach, and the tyranny of forcing all hires to believe in it, and they canned him.
Rod Dreher wrote about liberals and their obsession with privilege, bias and skews.
I would not want my children working for Google. I would not want my sons to be subject to that kind of ritual defamation and professional ruin for expressing the “wrong” opinions. And I would not want my daughter to have the kind of power over her coworkers that women do in the identity-liberal culture of Google. I want all my kids to work for employers that care about justice in the workplace, but do so within a context that — as James Damore suggested in his memo — treats employees as individuals.
What’s a “new Jew” worth?
Liberals have become race pimps in their search for a Holy Grail of diversity–some secret formula that counteracts the pernicious effects of privilege. The privilege of skin color; of growing up in a two-parent household; of having parents who value education and learning; of being part of a culture that values family and achievement.
Daniel Golden became so blissfully unaware of his own racism that he wrote in a book about Asians and affirmative action (The Price of Admission, 2006), that he stumbled in a ProPublica piece into anti-white, anti-Semitism.
In my book, I described Asian Americans as “the new Jews.” Like Jews before the 1960s, whose Ivy League enrollment was restricted by quotas, Asian Americans are overrepresented at selective colleges compared with their U.S. population, but are shortchanged relative to their academic performance.
In the paragraph immediately preceding that, he skewered Jared Kushner, an orthodox Jew, as a “poster boy” for the practice of displacing “more deserving candidates from other backgrounds, including Asian Americans and middle-class whites, without achieving the goals of affirmative action, such as diversity and redressing historical discrimination.”
I strain to contain my eyes lest they roll out of their sockets at such prideful claimed omniscience. Apparently, an “old Jew” is worth less than a “new Jew.”
The best way to redress historical discrimination is to give the discriminated class a way up without placing them in direct competition with those who are already at the pinnacle of the educational system in elite schools. Didn’t Golden learn anything at all from Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants who came to America with nothing, faced discrimination of all kinds, and through generational change finally achieved a result?
In other words: it’s okay to learn to be a plumber, or machinist, or welder if your father was a fruit peddler. Not every child of a blue-collar worker can (or should) go to Yale.
You can’t always get what you want.
And now, even high schools are getting into the race pimp act. A Virginia school sent this letter to parents:
“Through our collective work, advanced classes such as AP and Honors will have proportional representation,” read the letter. “Proportional representation is 40% White, 35% Hispanic, 12% African American, 10% mixed race.”
This is the racial outcome bell curve on stilts. Why would you want to place a lower achieving Hispanic or African American in a class to compete with higher achieving kids? So they can fail and feel less worthy? Or so the entire class can become a little less “advanced” and hold back the kids who got there by achieving standards?
Outcomes cannot be engineered, just like Google can’t force their workforce to look like the racial distribution of Santa Clara County and still be Google. No matter how much money they throw at the problem, the dice will still roll the same.
It takes generations for these changes to happen, and only when values, diversity of thought, family support systems, and playing for the long game take precedence over the shortcuts liberals are obsessed with taking.
Dead fish stink
Dreher quoted Mark Lilla’s new book The Once and Future Liberal (August 15 release):
The identity liberals’ approach to fishing is to remain on shore, yelling at the fish about the historical wrongs visited on them by the sea, and the need for aquatic life to renounce its privilege. All in the hope that the fish will collectively confess their sins and swim to shore to be netted. If that is your approach to fishing, you had better become a vegan.
That’s a kind analogy to fishing. In reality, race identity liberals would drain the lake, kill all the fish, count the number of crappie, bass, and catfish, then scoop the dead fish in proportion to their distribution into their ice chest.
But we all know that dead fish stink, and aren’t good to eat. So the liberals go to Whole Foods and buy fish, and claim they caught it. And if you point out the Whole Foods receipt to them in the Google lunchroom, you’re fired.
This post is cross-posted at The New Americana.
